Social media trends to watch out for
A social media marketing strategy is on the mind of many small business owners. And if it’s not on yours, it should be!
Major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram are fighting for market share, adjusting their business models to balance delivering better returns for shareholders and improving user experience.
As these platforms evolve, the way small businesses use them must also change.
Let’s look forward to ways to promote your business on social media in 2020.
More than 18 months later, the Federal Trade Commission has officially ruled that Cambridge Analytica defrauded Facebook users. The company harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook profiles without people’s consent and then used it for political advertising.
While Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt shortly after the scandal, Facebook is still hard at work tightening its data access processes and convincing people to trust its new specialized news platform.
Facebook has rolled out Facebook News for a subset of people in the US. This means that while you’ll still see posts from family and friends in your main feed, Facebook News will publish content from a team of journalists (hired by Facebook).
This year, the company is also focusing on cryptocurrency and creating its Facebook Pay feature. This could mean that your small business could soon be able to include selling on the platform in their account.
While the launch of Facebook Watch did not go as expected (only 140 million people watch videos and shows daily, which sounds huge, but it is not compared to the total 1.6 billion active users of the platform). However, it looks like Facebook will be making another attempt in 2020, so let’s see what this means for video marketing.
What do these changes mean for your social media marketing strategy?
We will have to wait and see. The more proprietary content a company creates, the more marketers can compete to stay visible.
The company recently announced that it will stop serving political ads and is updating its global privacy policy to give users more information about what data advertisers can collect.
We also wonder what the company’s vice president of design and research Dantley Davis had in mind when he announced a number of changes that could be coming to the platform as early as next year.
How will this affect the promotion of your business on social media?
You can have the ability to limit who retweets your tweet (I don’t see a feature that entrepreneurs use often, we love our retweets!) and the ability to tweet something to a specific group based on their interests.
Learn more about how to use Twitter hashtags.
Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has become the world’s largest professional networking platform.
Microsoft acquired the platform for $26.2 billion in 2016, and with access to Microsoft’s resources, we’ve seen updated professional content and more targeted advertising.
We’ve also seen LinkedIn Groups make a comeback.
A LinkedIn group allows your business to create a discussion board related to your industry. This gives you the opportunity to create a dedicated group of like-minded people specific to your product, service and/or experience.
Groups also provide great visibility for your business, as every member who is part of your group will have your logo displayed on their profile. Group owners now also have the ability to post different types of media, such as images and videos, and push notifications allow for real-time conversations.
Executive Suite has over 300,000 members and connects executives with web series, practical advice and discussion boards.
What do LinkedIn Groups mean for your small business?
Hopefully, this is the best way to foster a sense of community, find job candidates and increase brand awareness.
You may remember how Instagram tested deleting likes in several countries, including Australia, Japan, Italy, and Ireland. Likes haven’t gone away – in the US and Canada, you may still see likes count on your photos and videos, but not on other people’s posts.
So where did it come from? Facebook-owned Instagram has long dealt with people using hacks and workarounds. They come mostly from bots and unscrupulous companies that manipulate the app to make themselves or other users appear more popular than they really are. So this is an attempt to make Instagram more authentic.
Instagram says: “We hope this test will take your mind off the number of likes a post will get so you can focus on sharing what you love.”
While many entrepreneurs and small businesses are fine with this, influencers and video marketing agencies are not.
How can they show businesses how popular they are? How will they display the engagement?
But for the average small business owner who doesn’t buy likes and entertain the system with bots, it can be fine.
If your social media marketing strategy includes engaging content and you’re happy to focus on comments and growing followers, you’ll be fine.
Although IGTV got off to a slow start, it is now considered one of the biggest trends in social media. After Instagram announced earlier this year that Instagram would allow one-minute previews of IGTV videos on Instagram’s main feed, users (and businesses) started taking notice.
Unlike your other Instagram videos, IGTV videos can be 10-60 minutes long. This offers a great video marketing opportunity for interviews, behind-the-scenes features and more.
Since we can now also add landscape videos, I’m adding my videos from the Business Edge Show, which are very popular.
These are just some of the changes you can expect this year on major platforms. I’m sure there will be many more as the year progresses as things are always changing!
In order to effectively promote your business on social media in 2020, it is essential to not only understand social media trends, but also embrace them.
If you’re struggling to stay on top of social media, consider hiring an agency that can develop strategies that meet your social media needs and goals so you can focus on building your business.